exGDD: Extended Game Design Document template for Mobile Game Design and Development

In gaming industry, requirement gathering is considered as the most crucial phase of game development. It is also considered as a critical software engineering research area as about 39.3% of the overall published papers on computer games discussed game development with requirements. Requirement gathering phase of the mobile game is different from traditional approaches like Software Requirement Document (SRS). Game Design Document (GDD) is used as requirement specification document for mobile game development which provides detailed features and functionality of the games. The basic GDD version provides game concept analysis and template for requirement specification. The improved version,called improved GDD (iGDD), provides enhanced game development design by adding the experience of game players.  However, both of these versions do not include non-functional requirements of the target audience.The objective of this paper is to conduct an analysis of existing GDD in practice in game development industry and propose a template-tool to extend Game Design Document, named as exGDD. The exGDD considers more non-functional requirements of the target audience. The proposed template is evaluated with Core Elements of the Gaming Experience (CEGE). The evaluation of exGDD is conducted using evaluation tool and conducting case study. The results are promising which shows that the use of exGDD will lead to the success of the end product in terms of satisfying user requirements and can result in improved productivity of the company.